Adrienne Rich-'The Will To Change'

[Goodrum]

"What does not change / is the will to change."

Wikipedia intro:

Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist.

She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts

...born in Baltimore, Maryland, the older of two sisters. Her father, the renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the Chairman of Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, was a concert pianist (before she married) and a composer.

Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians.

-Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father who encouraged her to read but also to write her own poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Rossetti, and Tennyson.

Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a prodigy." Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother until Adrienne began public education in the fourth grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions for her—moving into a world in which she was expected to excel.

In later years, Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she described as a "good old fashioned girls school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned."

After graduating from high school, Rich gained her college diploma at Radcliffe College, Harvard, where she focused primarily on poetry and learning writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all. In 1951, her last year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume.

Following her graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship, to study in Oxford for a year. Following a visit to Florence, she decided to cut short her study at Oxford and spend her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy..

Wikipedia intro:

Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist.

She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts

...born in Baltimore, Maryland, the older of two sisters. Her father, the renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the Chairman of Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, was a concert pianist (before she married) and a composer.

Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians.

-Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father who encouraged her to read but also to write her own poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Rossetti, and Tennyson.

Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a prodigy." Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother until Adrienne began public education in the fourth grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions for her—moving into a world in which she was expected to excel.

In later years, Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she described as a "good old fashioned girls school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned."

After graduating from high school, Rich gained her college diploma at Radcliffe College, Harvard, where she focused primarily on poetry and learning writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all. In 1951, her last year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume.

Following her graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship, to study in Oxford for a year. Following a visit to Florence, she decided to cut short her study at Oxford and spend her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy..

[Goodrum]

Tribute from Forbes:

Fiercely independent and imaginative, Adrienne Rich spoke up, often sharply, about injustice, racism, peace, war between the sexes and, of course, lesbianism. At times, she seemed to go out of her way to infuriate conventional forces — even those sympathetic to her art, declining the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 and the National Medal of Arts in 1997.


But Rich reached well beyond a strictly feminist audience, and her tap roots lie deep in Blake, Keats, Tennyson and others. Her dozen books of verse have sold 750,000-plus copies, the equivalent of platinum for a poet. “Diving into the Wreck,” the title poem to her 1973 collection transforms self-discovery into a terrifying and courageous act that transcends sexual politics: “I came to see the/damage that was/done/and the treasures/that prevail.”

-In 1953, Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard University, whom she had met as an undergraduate. She had said of the match: "I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family ... I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life, whatever was possible."

They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts and had three sons.

The 1960s began a period of change in Rich's life: she received the National Institute of Arts and Letters award (1960), her second Guggenheim Fellowship to work at the Netherlands Economic Institute (1961), and the Bollingen Foundation grant for the translation of Dutch poetry (1962).

In 1963, Rich published her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which was a much more personal work examining her female identity, reflecting the increasing tensions she experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s, marking a substantial change in Rich's style and subject matter. In her 1982 essay "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity", Rich states "The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me."

The book met with harsh reviews. She comments, "I was seen as 'bitter' and 'personal'; and to be personal was to be disqualified, and that was very shaking because I'd really gone out on a limb ... I realised I'd gotten slapped over the wrist, and I didn't attempt that kind of thing again for a long time."


Increasingly militant, Rich hosted anti-war and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment; tensions began to split the marriage, Conrad fearing that his wife had lost her mind.

The couple separated in mid-1970 and shortly afterward, in October, Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself.

In 1971, she was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and spent the next year and a half teaching at Brandeis University as the Hurst Visiting Professor of Creative Writing.



In 1973 that Rich wrote Diving into the Wreck, a collection of exploratory and often angry poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974, which she shared with Allen Ginsberg.

Declining to accept it individually, Rich was joined by the two other feminist poets nominated, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, to accept it on behalf of all women.

In 1976, Rich began her lifelong partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."

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From Salon:

Adrienne Rich was a major American poet, cultural critic, essayist and activist. Her six decades of verse and prose helped to change what was possible, both in the writing of poetry and in the work for social, economic and environmental justice that Rich herself came to see as inseparable from what she wrote.

Nobody in the history of American writing had her combination of powers, and nobody gathered the same array of otherwise disparate admirers: She is both deeply, and widely, missed.

Rich’s first books, in the 1950s, established her formal skill; W. H. Auden selected her debut, “A Change of World,” for the Yale Younger Poets prize when Rich was still an undergraduate, and some of its deftly careful work remains widely taught. She came into her own, however, beginning with “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (1963), one of the first collections of poems by anyone to bring to light the contradictions, the challenges and the frustrations of life as a woman, a mother, an intellectual and an American artist in those years: Rich in that poem imagines earlier women writers, among them Emily Dickinson, “knowing themselves too well in one another:/ their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn … iron-beaked and purposed as a bird,/ dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.”

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

"I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included. "

-- Adrienne Rich

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National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

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From NYT's:

Theirs was a bookish household, and Adrienne, as she said afterward, was groomed by her father to be a literary prodigy. He encouraged her to write poetry when she was still a child, and she steeped herself in the poets in his library — all men, she later ruefully observed. But those men gave her the formalist grounding that let her make her mark when she was still very young.

In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

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a writing career that spanned more than six decades, feminist poet and activist Adrienne C. Rich ’51­ died Tuesday at the age of 82. Rich’s work, which includes numerous collections of poetry and prose essays, explored themes of women’s rights, racism, and politics.

“No poet with her linguistic gifts has done as much to make more of the world outside of poetry. She was clearly one of the major poets of her time,” said English professor Stephen L. Burt, who teacheShe was a tiny giant. She was very short, but her words and her poetry spoke very loudlys and studies Rich’s work.

Her writing would evolve drastically during the course of her lifetime—a shift that mirrored her sometimes tumultuous personal life.

“She was a remarkable, generous, passionate woman,” said Frances Golden, Rich’s longtime literary agent.

“a writing career that spanned more than six decades, feminist poet and activist Adrienne C. Rich ’51­ died Tuesday at the age of 82. Rich’s work, which includes numerous collections of poetry and prose essays, explored themes of women’s rights, racism, and politics.

“No poet with her linguistic gifts has done as much to make more of the world outside of poetry. She was clearly one of the major poets of her time,” said English professor Stephen L. Burt, who teaches and studies Rich’s work.

Her writing would evolve drastically during the course of her lifetime—a shift that mirrored her sometimes tumultuous personal life.

“She was a remarkable, generous, passionate woman,” said Frances Golden, Rich’s longtime literary agent.

“She was a tiny giant. She was very short, but her words and her poetry spoke very loudly.”
.”

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Rich published 30 books over the course of her life, all of which are still in print. Between 750,000 and 800,000 copies of her works have been sold, according to her publisher W.W. Norton and Company.

“She had the most profound respect for the power of the written word,” said her son, Jacob Conrad. “She wanted her legacy to be her writing.”

Coming out as a lesbian in 1976, at a time when it engendered extreme hostility, she began a relationship with the editor and writer Michelle Cliff, who was to become her lifelong companion. That year, Rich published Twenty-One Love Poems, her homage to lesbian passion:

"Whatever happens with us, your body / will haunt mine – tender, delicate / your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond / of the fiddlehead fern in forests / just washed by sun."

In 1980, Rich published the essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, in which she argued that it was necessary to break the taboo about lesbianism and reject the heterosexuality routinely forced upon women. Prior to this, the almost universal assumption – even among the most radical of feminists – was that sexual preference was biologically determined as opposed to a social construction that benefited patriarchy.

In 1986, on being awarded the Ruth Lilly poetry prize by the American Council for the Arts and the Modern Poetry Association, Rich declared that poetry was not the private preserve of academics. "It's not just something for scholars to write about. It is for people." Her other commendations included the National Book award, the Academy of American Poets fellowship, and a MacArthur "genius" award. In 1997, she made headlines when she turned down the National medal of arts from President Bill Clinton, for what she called "political reasons". Raging against the inequalities in American life, she expressed her dismay that the president should honour "a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonoured".

Her poem Ballade of the Poverties, from the collection Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, outlines her commitment to the fight for social equality: "There's the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl / The poverty of to steal food for the first time / The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck."

Rich remained involved in feminist activism throughout her life and was an active member of a number of campaigns, including Sisterhood in Support of Sisters, in South Africa, and the Boston Women's Fund. "When a woman tells the truth," she once proclaimed, "she is creating the possibility of more truth around her."

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On coming out in the 1970s

"I'm one of the lesbians who came out through the women's movement. And I don't mean I wouldn't have come out without a women's movement, but it's very hard to imagine the world without the women's liberation movement at this point. However, in my own history, that was the point. It was a time of tremendous intensity among women — women of all kinds. Women who had known they were lesbians all their lives, women who were then coming out, women who were then and have remained heterosexual. There was a kind of intensity around the politics that was very profound and passionate. It was very moving and very exciting to see women taking their strength and taking hold of each other's strength and bringing out the power in each other. ... The passion was political, and the politics was passionate. Yes, it was very sexual, and it was also a milieu and a time that was very political."

On relationships

"A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it's not to be summed up. It's not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time's power, if you will."

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Adrienne Rich made a very important contribution to poetry," Helen Vendler, a Harvard University professor and literary critic told The Times in 2005. "She was able to articulate a modern American conscience. She had the command of language and the imagery to express it."

Rich came of age during the social upheaval of the 1960s and '70s and was best known as an advocate of women's rights, which she explored in poetry and prose. But she also passionately addressed the antiwar movement and wrote of the marginalized and underprivileged.

Her intense critique of contemporary society combined with her political activism set her apart from other leading women poets of her generation, including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She attended rallies against the Vietnam War, organized poetry readings for peace and marched for women's rights — and urged every writer to address social injustice in their art.

In "On Edges," a 1968 poem about women's rights, she wrote:

I'd rather

taste blood, yours or mine, flowing

from a sudden slash, than cut all day

with blunt scissors on dotted lines

like the teacher told.

From her first book of poems in the early 1950s, Rich revealed her feminist bearings, and when universities introduced courses in women's studies, Rich was likely to be included.

"Adrienne Rich was a voice for the feminist movement when it was just starting and didn't have a voice," said Barbara Gelpi, a professor emeritus of English and women's studies at Stanford University who with her husband, Albert, co-edited the 1993 volume "Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose."

"She expressed the sources of women's pain when women were coming to a sense of their own history and potential," Barbara Gelpi said in a 2005 interview with The Times.
Issues of inequality based on race, education and financial status fueled Rich's writing, but she was particularly critical of imbalance between the sexes. It was a recurring theme in her work dating to 1951, her senior year at Radcliffe College, when she published her first book of poems, "A Change of World."

Born May 16, 1929, and raised in Baltimore, Rich attributed her scholarly bent to her father, Arnold Rich, a physician and professor at Johns Hopkins University whom she later recalled as controlling. She was troubled that he encouraged Adrienne and her younger sister Cynthia to leave their Jewish traditions behind and wrote a 1982 essay, "Split at the Root," about the identity crisis it caused. Her mother was Episcopalian.

When Rich married Harvard economics professor Alfred Conrad, who was an Orthodox Jew, her parents refused to attend the 1953 wedding.

With Conrad, she had three sons in five years. She rarely mentioned her children in her writing, but friends said she was an excellent mother who remained close to her family.

But she became frustrated by the conventional roles of wife and mother and blamed society for giving men power over women's lives. In a man's world, she once wrote, women "live in other people's houses."

In the mid-1960s, Rich and her family moved from Cambridge, Mass., to New York City, where she taught poetry at Swarthmore College and Columbia University, and remedial English to disadvantaged students at City College of New York.

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The book led to Rich's winning the National Book Award in 1974. At first, she refused the honor but eventually accepted it with the two other women poet nominees, Alice Walker and Audre Lord, on behalf "of all women whose voices have been silenced," Rich had explained.....Some critics considered Rich an angry poet, and she agreed.

"I'm affirming anger. It has been a tremendous vein of creativity for women," she told The Times in 1983.

She taught English, poetry and creative writing at several colleges in the East in the 1970s and formed a lasting personal relationship with novelist and critic Michelle Cliff. They coedited the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom from 1981 to 1983.

In person, Rich was bright, engaging and instantly likable, with a strain of independence in her voice, the Guardian reported in 2002.

When she received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 for "School Among the Ruins, Poems 2000-2004," she thanked "the movements and activists which have educated and fired me throughout my life."